Ruth Hooley (Carr)

Literature

Ruth Carr was born in Belfast in 1953 and attended Queen’s University, Belfast, Stranmillis College and The University of Ulster.

She edited The Female Line in 1985 (under the name Hooley). This was the first anthology of drama, fiction and poetry by women to come out of N.Ireland. She also compiled the section on contemporary women’s fiction in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (IV/V) and was a co-editor of The Honest Ulsterman (HU poetry magazine) for about 15 years and produced its last issue (2003) in commemoration of its founding editor, James Simmons.

She is a founder member of the Word of Mouth women’s poetry collective whose Word of Mouth anthology (Blackstaff, 1998) has been translated into Russian and was launched in St Petersburg in November 2006. The collective has also produced a bilingual anthology in translation of five Russian Poets’ work, entitled When the Neva Rushes Backwards (Lagan Press, 2014). She has published two collections, There is a House and The Airing Cupboard (Summer Palace Press, 1999 & 2008), and is working on a third.

“The thing was, not to exploit the conflict but rather to address what was so immense and so much part of our lives in ways that did not preach or rant (there was an excess of that already), but that caught and added small human details to the huge canvas.”